The New Literacy

Redefining Reading and Writing in the Schools

John Willinsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351235921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1990. This book examines the innovative programs that changed the way reading and writing was taught during the previous ten years. Both teacher and critic of the New Literacy programs, the author gives a perspective that allows educators, parents, and other readers to assess the promise of these programs. Examining the work of educators from the USA, UK and Canada, he compares programs from first grade to college that foster a new level of literate engagement and voice in students while creating a less authoritative place in which to learn. The book opens up wider debate about literacy in a society concerned with shifting authority from text and teacher to student.

1

Introducing the
New Literacy

Three scenes from the New Literacy

Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself

Wallace Stevens

Scene 1: In a Nova Scotia classroom, Kathleen Hefferman has her students keep journals for their study of kites; eight-year-old Craig begins his first entry with, “one time i was flying a kit with my freind,” and Kathleen reflects on this process:

The journal in our classroom is a dialogue journal between student and teacher, and therefore Craig is aware of his audience—a trusted adult. The relationship between teacher and student has been built up over several months of communicating in the journal. Craig knows that the journal is his place for recounting events, sharing feelings, and asking questions. He knows that the message he has to share is more important to this particular reader than his accurate spelling and punctuation so he writes freely, says what he has to say about his kite experience and considers the piece finished. What the teacher does now in response to the writing, and in response to the child as author, has the potential either to inhibit the child’s writing or to encourage, nurture, and extend it (Hefferman, 1982, p. 85).

Scene 2: In an Australian high school, Garth Boomer is observing a sophomore class that has been reading a novel and is now finding a way into the work that can be the source of both personal and group response to it:

Later in the lesson, as requested by Mrs. Bell, they negotiate themselves into friendship or “convenience” groups and each group receives a worksheet which asks them to establish what is meant by “self-awareness,” and “in search of inner self” in relation to the novel. It is suggested that they brainstorm personal examples and then report to the class. After this they are to prepare a reading/performance or presentation of a poem which reveals one of these themes, explaining how it relates to the novel. The instruction reads: “Decide how the group will go about this. In what way can the group support each other? How will you present the poems and your reactions? Decide on group and individual tasks” (Boomer, 1985, p. 102).

Scene 3: In a college in the United States, Walker and Elias are working with a writing program that guides students through scheduled conferences between the writing instructor and the writer:

Teacher: I probably might start by having you tell me a little bit about how this went for you while you were writing it and how you felt about it when it was done.

Student: Well, um, I liked my ideas … I started writing about something more like we talked about in class and I got off on a little bit different subject, as you can tell, which I was a lot more interested in what we were doing, so I was more excited to write about that, and I had quite a few ideas on the subject. I had trouble fitting it into categories, so I was a little concerned about coherence as a whole.

Teacher: What would you say worked out the best for you in writing the paper? What do you remember as being the best thing about it?

Student: The ideas, probably.

Teacher: Good. I think you’re right. That’s exactly what the strength of the paper is. What are you least satisfied with? What would you have liked to work on more?

Student: I didn’t think my diction, my sentences were good, cuz I had time to work on it, but not enough … (Walker & Elias, 1987, p. 276).

Such is this educational phenomenon which I am terming the “New Literacy,” if only in three of its many guises. Although it may not seem so at first glance, these classroom programs share a common core of radical assumptions about teacher and student, and about language and literacy. Yet at this point they share these assumptions without knowing it, without being part of a concerted educational movement. There is no overarching body, such as there once was with Progressive Education Association which provided a collective identity for an equally diverse set of innovative programs earlier in this century. For want of this public sense of a common cause, for what might be gained by comparing notes on a shared approach to education, I feel justified in reaching with a free hand across the international educational community to pull together this particular array of programs under a single title. The strength of the connections among them is part of this book’s argument, as is the fact that each of these innovations falls within a much larger educational phenomenon than a simple adding up of the different reading and writing strategies would suggest.

My interests in the New Literacy go beyond proposing connections. In the first instance, these programs have something to learn from each other, as they operate at different educational levels and on different aspects of literacy. By assembling the common assumptions about literacy that link them, by digging about in the roots of these assumptions in search of a greater coherence for this larger project that unites them, I hope to clarify the direction they appear to be headed in this collective sense. At its most presumptuous, this book would add to these innovations by making something larger of them, by setting them within a theater of educational and intellectual developments; it would confront this New Literacy with the implications that arise from what is, in essence, a radical and subversive proposal for changing the nature of literacy in the schools, even as it begins with the seeming innocence of keeping a journal about flying a kite. But, as well, the story of the New Literacy remains a personal one for me. As I have sought to understand my own attraction to these different but linked manners of teaching, I hope to help others see what is at stake in this alternative approach to literacy in the schools.

The innovation in these programs is not so much the classroom strategies that they have introduced. Soliciting personal responses to poetry or conducting writing conferences between instructor and writer can amount to little more than a gimmick that enlivens a lesson. More interesting is the conception of literacy that underlies these experiments and explorations in the teaching of students to read and write. I am contending that beneath these teaching strategies is a desire on the part of the educator to restructure the life of the classroom through an approach to literacy which challenges conventions of classroom organization and the typical roles of teacher and student. Which is to say that this new literacy is about more than instructional techniques for reading and writing, just as literacy is about more than the ability to score at or above the mean on standardized tests. To begin to think about what this new literacy might be about requires, in the first instance, a different manner of thinking about literacy.

However, before getting under way I must qualify my presumptuous designation of a New Literacy. I am not so “new” myself as to imagine that each of the programs described here is not without precedents in earlier, education experiments. Among the earlier claims on new-ness is John Dewey’s program of “New Education” (1900) introduced at the University of Chicago Elementary School; in Great Britain, shortly thereafter, the New Education Fellowship became well known for its “taint of pedagogical and political radicalism” (Cremin, 1961, p. 248). More recently, with an assist from Marshall McLuhan, a “new literacy” has been declared for the “reading” of film and other media (Foster, 1979; Gordon, 1971). The point is well taken, and I would graciously acknowledge these two precedents in the use of this book’s title. However, the concern among the innovations I am reporting on is with a literacy that resides in its original home with print and the concerns of reading and writing; this speaks to a change in the educational climate over the last decade, in the ways of renewal and redefinition in education. Thus, after thinking a good deal about an appropriate label for this phenomenon, I decided that I could do no better than group these reading and writing programs under the somewhat generic heading of the New Literacy, with the upper case treatment serving as an extra touch of boldness to assist me in making the case for its existence. The use of “new” has its own ironies in our society, no less so in education than in a commercial sense. It retains about it that hopeful quality and offers no further description of what it modifies than the wish to be seen to freshen up or revitalize an older product or concept.

Whether the use of “new” is warranted, however, is a decision upon which we have all learned to withhold judgement. The rub of it is that the “New Literacy” is an hypothesis on my part, not so much in its originality, as in the currency of its challenge to the educational scene. Thus, taking into account the fact that the label is borrowed rather than invented, and perhaps only a placeholder until a more lasting coinage occurs, I should caution you against letting drop references to the “New Literacy” at, say, the educational conference equivalent of the proverbial cocktail party—the wine and cheese reception. I suspect that no one outside of this readership will understand what you are talking about. Which is to say, I suppose, that you’ll fit in wonderfully at the reception. In the meantime, however, this yet-to-be-certified school of thought has been waiting on someone to step back far enough from the fray that the pattern of connections begins to become apparent among the different segments of it which have emerged over the last twenty years, segments which have gone under such names as Whole Language, the Growth Model and its related developments in Language for Learning and Writing Across the Curriculum, Socio-Psycholinguistic variations with Schema Theory, Reader-Response Theory and Transformational Reading, along with the variations of the Writing Process Movement including the Bay Area Project which has grown into the successful National Writing Project.

My claim is that a “New Literacy” lies latent and unrealized among this host of different experiments in the teaching of reading and writing. My use of this label is meant to form an umbrella under which I can gather and examine an array of innovations in the teaching and researching of reading and writing, innovations that have made inroads in programs from the primary grades to college composition. An umbrella may be a particularly apt metaphor for the process of pulling together these programs, if only because they must weather continuing indifference, if not outright opposition, from the elements of political conservatism that continue to hold sway on the educational front. The times are not entirely conducive to the liberal inclinations of the New Literacy.

In Great Britain, they were opposed repeatedly by the Black Papers of the 1970s which took great issue with “this ‘sociological’ attitude,” as an early Paper put it, and the apparent rejection of standards: “The progressive emphasis on either endogenous creativity (undisciplined by any inwardness with the language of greatness) or social relevance (applying the human reductiveness characteristic of much of the contemporary) has replaced an earlier concern with quality” (Bantock in Cox & Boyson, 1975). More recently, the Kingman Report (Kingman, 1988), which dared a moderate path in rejecting grammar lessons while setting attainment targets in standard English, was cooly received by a considerably less progressive government and press. In the United States, storms of accountability began to break in the 1980s hitting the schools in waves, amid headlines on the declining standards in the schools and a bevy of blue-ribbon committee reports of a nation at risk. In an unusual proclamation of public interest in declarations of the educational decline of the west, E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (1987) and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) spent a good deal of time on the best-seller lists during the period in which I have been writing this book. Yet in spite of having to make allowances for this turn in the weather, the New Literacy is still on its way to being a major player in the educational marketplace, to pick up on the language of the times, and one that speaks in a relatively new way to the place and standard of literacy in society.

The work of the New Literacy

To begin to gain a sense of what is being revitalized in the case of the New Literacy, it would be helpful to imagine literacy as a way of working the world. This may strike you as an odd and not very promising beginning for literacy, but it will prove helpful in appreciating how it is to be redefined in these innovative classrooms. I use the term “work” to stress the sense in which literacy can be understood as a social practice that takes certain materials and turns them to certain ends in a given setting, an activity that takes up a place in a life, as working on something does. In this scheme of things, as I will reiterate throughout this book, literacy is better understood not as an isolated skill, as something one can do on demand, but as a social process in the daily landscape; one works with someone else’s writing or writes for another under a roof of one sort or another in building something that will be of use to yourself or others. Although I will go on to make much more of literacy as a psychological and political event in this book, I want to begin with this initial belabored conception of it. This regard for literacy as actively making something of the world is part of the reorientation that is necessary to appreciate the New Literacy project.

The New Literacy is challenging the meaning of literacy and the nature of this work with language; these programs are suggesting above all else that literacy can be worked in another fashion and toward different ends in the classroom. The workshop will come up as more than metaphor in this description of New Literacy programs, and given the raw material of language as a sort of freshly milled lumber, the New Literacy opts not only for a new set of projects to be cut and jointed from that wood, but employs a new set of tools for working it and runs the shop as a cooperative enterprise. To begin with what will be a book-full of definitional statements about this project, I would suggest that New Literacy programs are intent on altering the meaning of this classroom work. As can be seen from the three scenes cited in the opening of this chapter, the shift involves increasing the students’ control over the text and its meaning. But to shift this meaning of literacy also necessarily alters the relationship between teacher and student. The teacher, as an authority on what needs to be known and done, begins to turn over more of this responsibility to the student and to the meaning that comes from somewhere within the student’s work with literacy. In these terms, then, the New Literacy’s proposal is to reshape the work of the classroom around a different form of reading and writing. The moral, psychological, and social worth of this literacy begins with the students as sources of experience and meaning. To alter the form of literacy in this fashion clearly entails redefining the role and relationship of teacher and student.

One of the major contentions of this book is that the New Literacy is as much about the way educators work with students and texts in a classroom as it is about actually improving instruction in literacy. Although I want to bring before you instances from the research on literacy that support, temper, and undermine the case for the New Literacy, I believe that there is another story underlying the reasons that educators turn to or away from the sorts of programs that fall under my rubric of the New Literacy. Rather than basing its claims on comparative research with other programs, the New Literacy begins with a much simpler, if more profound, question for educators who have grown a little weary of waiting for the definitive research answer to effective education. The New Literacy poses the question in terms of a personal philosophy and the sense made of how people should work together in a classroom: Are these the lessons that I want students to learn about literacy? Is this how I want to spend my days, working in this way with students and with books? These are the questions that raise the doubts about the common fare and initiate the interest in what New Literacy programs have to offer.

Yet it would be misleading to suggest that questions of classroom effectiveness and accountability are spurious for advocates of the New Literacy. The New Literacy consists of programs that have students actively engaged in writing and reading, programs that produce hours of focused discussion, reams of notes and drafts, scores of performances and publications. While attention is given to process in a whole new way, these are processes that are productive, that are effective in eliciting from the student indications that learning is going on in one form or another. Yet it is also fair to say that these indications of process—the talk, drafts, and finished pieces—have not produced a consensus within the educational community that this is a superior way of teaching literacy. As I shall examine in the chapters that follow, the research comparing the New Literacy to other programs has not often decided in its favor, although neither has it conclusively refuted its value. This is why I return to the one point that does seem clear about the New Literacy. In ways that this book will explore, it constitutes a different form of thinking and practice about teaching and literacy. That is to say, the New Literacy is about new institutional goals for the schools, new professional goals for teaching, and new educational goals for literacy. In fact, I wish to make this principle of shifted goals in the work of the classroom a defining characteristic of the New Literacy: The New Literacy consists of those strategies in the teaching of reading and writing which attempt to shift the control of literacy from the teacher to the student; literacy is promoted in such programs as a social process with language that can from the very beginning extend the students’ range of meaning and connection.

This statement stands against a literacy which is defined as the ability to perform at a certain level on a standardized test and which asks education for preparation and practice in that ability. It is to resist treating literacy simply as a competence that people have or do not have at some arbitrary level. The distinction might be made clearer by drawing on the analogy of riding a bike. Those moving toward New Literacy programs are insisting that the point is not to develop the ability to ride, which leads to sessions of practicing and demonstrating the skill. The advocate of the New Literacy claims that if bikes are worth riding then the learning should begin with the intent of taking you places, if only to the end of the block on that first shaky run. What is important about riding are the places to which you ride and the pleasures gained along the way. In the process of this riding with a purpose, the skill naturally improves. Which is to say, the New Literacy challenges traditional conceptions of learning to read and write when it declares that purpose and intent are foremost concerns with literacy. But more than that, New Literacy programs would shift the locus of intention and purpose t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Preface
• 1 Introducing the New Literacy
• 2 Writing in the Real
• 3 Reading Lessons
• 4 Literature in Response
• 5 The Troubled Romance of Expression
• 6 Putting Literacy to the Test
• 7 Popular Literacy and Romanticism
• 8 Meaning, Literature, and Self
• 9 Critical Futures
• References
• Index